A Whale of a Tale

By Richard C. Morais

My friend and colleague, Phil Roosevelt, just sent me this “letter” from Nantucket. Seriously, if you are beaten up and burnt out, turn off the Bloomberg, get a cup of coffee (or glass of wine), and take a few minutes to read this fine bit of writing from Barron’s Deputy Managing Editor. I promise, his account will put the wind back in your sails.

When a man leaves his comfortable quarters in New York in the dark hours of a January morning and eventually boards a boat heading 30 miles out to sea, he plainly has something in mind. In my case, it was to nourish the soul. I was traveling to Nantucket for the island’s first-ever marathon reading of Moby Dick.

The ferry pushed into the vast expanse of Nantucket Sound. I settled into the cabin and pulled out my dog-eared copy of the great tome. Until last year, I had spent a lifetime avoiding Moby Dick. Then I finally cracked the monstrous thing and absolutely loved it. In fact, I wanted more. So I went on the Internet, discovered the marathon, and signed up as one of 80 readers who would take turns reading the book aloud, chapter by chapter, through daylight, darkness and daylight again, right to the end. As tiny Nantucket came into view out my window—“a mere hillock, an elbow of sand,” as Melville called it—I took a last look at the two chapters I’d been assigned. I was ready to read. I was ready to ruminate. Above all, I was ready to endure.

A heavy snow was falling on the island’s cobblestone streets this past Saturday as my fellow readers and I got to work. We filed into the Nantucket Atheneum, a white Greek Revival library and lecture hall where the likes of Emerson and Thoreau had once taken to the rostrum. At precisely noon, the first reader, one Len Germinara, unburdened himself of the most famous opening line in American literature: “Call me Ishmael.” We were off and running.

As it turned out, I was the only out-of-towner at the marathon; the marketing wasn’t what it might have been. The rest of the folks were year-round Nantucketers looking for some constructive amusement in the off-season doldrums. Some guffawed at my long journey. Others just puzzled over my presence. But they gamely took me in, and at 9:50 on Saturday night I walked to the head of the room.

“Chapter 49, The Hyena,” I began.“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.”

Frankly, that passage made me squirm. Were the Nantucketers quietly snickering at something I didn’t know about? Had I stumbled into the wrong marathon? Maybe this was the Huckleberry Finn room. Or perhaps my fly was down. I pressed on regardless, making my way through Melville’s long, twisty sentences and wrapping up in about 15 minutes. The actual reading went reasonably well, and I could now just sit back and marvel at the momentous proceedings.

To be sure, this was not the first Moby Dick marathon the world had seen—the one-time whaling port of New Bedford, Mass., has been staging them for a number of years. But as Nantucket’s first, it was unquestionably important. For Nantucket was the birthplace of American whaling, the home of the first dories to get yanked around the seven seas by harpooned leviathans in wild “Nantucket sleigh rides.”

Nantucket, as Ishmael says, was “the great original,” which is precisely why he chose to ship out from the island rather than from New Bedford. Ishmael walked the wharves of Nantucket, saw the Pequod and cast his lot with the crazed Captain Ahab. So now, all these years later, we had the original whaling port reading the ultimate whale tale. I was transfixed. Except for a short nap between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m., I took in the whole thing.

Reader after reader took a spell at this ship’s wheel. The waves rolled by. On and on we went, sailing toward the book’s inevitable, harrowing conclusion. It was Cynthia Csabay, a longtime actress and director at the Theatre Workshop of Nantucket, who read the final scene, and oh, what a reading. This was an extraordinary example of the power of the human voice, proof positive that even in the age of iPads and IMAX, 3D and 4G, there’s nothing like a good yarn as filtered through a good reader’s eyes, brain, throat and mouth. In almost operatic tones, accompanied by mesmerizing sways of her head, arms and torso, Csabay steered us through the sinking of the Pequod and revealed the improbable destiny of its lone survivor, Ishmael.

At 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, our own little ship reached port. As they stumbled ashore, the crew, like all serious whalers, began plotting another voyage, perhaps for next year (keep an eye on www.nantucketatheneum.org ). Finally they all helped themselves to a round of chowder made from a recipe plucked from the pages of Moby Dick.

If only Herman Melville could have watched. Nothing seemed to end well for him, and that goes double for his labors on Moby Dick. He was up against a wall when he began writing the book. His literary reputation was in decline and his debts on the rise: He owed substantial sums to a bank, a friend and his father-in law. He needed a big win. So he sat down at his desk in the Berkshires and spewed forth 210,018 words in 135 chapters. By the time he laid down his pen, his eyes were burning so badly that he could barely look at the pages.

And then? Nothing. Moby Dick was a flop when it came out in 1851; it confounded critics and laymen alike with its often-dense prose and seemingly inexplicable digressions. Melville lived out his days as a customs inspector and minor poet, dying in obscurity in 1891. Only in the 1920s did the world begin to appreciate his sprawling book about a whale, which is really a book about everything. Now, more than 160 years since its creation, Moby Dick is by most lights The Great American Novel.

Yes, endurance comes in all sizes and shapes, and on Nantucket, it’s the currency of the land. No one leaves home without it. If you think the moneyed summertime inhabitants are somehow exempt, think again. Their gorgeous houses on the dunes, it turns out, are increasingly in danger of slipping into the sea. Erosion is a huge problem and getting worse. The same ocean that shaped the island is now rapidly taking it back. The scuttlebutt is that all of Nantucket may vanish in as little as 200 years. True to form, the residents are responding with defiance: In one of the hardest-hit areas, on the ocean-facing southern shore, someone is actually putting up a new house, right there on the water’s edge.

As I headed for the ferry home, I suddenly remembered I worked for Barron’s. So I fired off an e-mail to Nathaniel Philbrick, a Nantucket resident, a celebrated writer of history and the author of the excellent and recently published, Why Read Moby Dick?Why, I asked Philbrick, should investors read Moby Dick?

He said the best lessons for investors are in Chapter 49, The Hyena. Son of gun if it wasn’t the very chapter I’d been reading in what now seemed like another century. No, my fly hadn’t been down. That business about a vast practical joke was just Ishmael’s way of laying out his world view. In that passage and ones that follow, Philbrick pointed out, Ishmael essentially makes the case for a sharp sense of humor and a truly open mind.

“I think we all get locked into our own little self-satisfied view of the world,” Phibrick wrote to me. “What Ishmael (and Melville) understood was the need to appreciate that there are other ways of looking at things: Some are weirdly wonderful, others are terrifying and downright evil, but it’s up to us to at least try to understand them. Otherwise it’s too easy to just get mad and be bulldozed by unexpected developments in an ever-changing, seemingly unknowable world.”

I now fully understood the words I had read, and I took them to heart as I set sail into Nantucket Sound. Call me Phil.

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There are 6 comments

JANUARY 27, 2012 9:29 A.M.

Charlotte wrote:

I love the paragraph you analyzed from Moby Dick[(we love Nantucket, too) and the novel is truly great.]

I felt that way once when we couldn't leave Reno airport due to high winds in Houston(where Continental inevitably connects) and four or five of us women started a support group-LOL. One of them going to Paris
had to wait an extra day in Houston, and so did an Army woman trying to go home to a boyfriend in North
Carolina. I had gotten really low on cash and was trying to figure out the logistics of spending the night in Houston. It sure felt to me like a novel or a movie, written for someone else's amusement or pleasure.

JANUARY 27, 2012 1:52 P.M.

Holly Finigan wrote:

I had the pleasure of serving this writer at DUNE while he enjoyed Nantucket Bay Scallops and a diet coke, preparing himself for the "Moby" feat that was ahead of him.

He was kind and thoughtful and managed to capture much of the magical island of Nantucket, even on a snowy weekend during the calm of the winter.

Well done, Phil.

JANUARY 27, 2012 1:57 P.M.

Anonymous wrote:

Nicely done, Phil. Thanks for making the trek out to our little hillock of sand.

JANUARY 28, 2012 9:50 A.M.

Sean wrote:

Just boarding the ferry for Nantucket clears your head and transports you to another world AND another time if you've taken the time to read Moby Dick. I'm happy to know that you finally read it and then took the experience to another level by participating in the marathon. I admire that and also found it interesting that you were the only outsider. I know the book well and Nantucket well, so I could easily imagine myself on the weekend journey that you shared. I live in Texas now and have a powerful urge to take an overdue trip to Nantucket after reading your article.

Thanks Phil

JANUARY 28, 2012 9:54 A.M.

Sean wrote:

Oh, and thanks Richard for sharing this

JANUARY 28, 2012 4:20 P.M.

Ron Boyd wrote:

Well done Phil!

We all have moments of clarity, of insight. What is a shame is that we so often shelve them as keepsakes, not lighthouses in which to sail our culture and personal destiny toward.

About Penta

Written with Barron’s wit and often contrarian perspective, Penta provides the affluent with advice on how to navigate the world of wealth management, how to make savvy acquisitions ranging from vintage watches to second homes, and how to smartly manage family dynamics.

Richard C. Morais, Penta’s editor, was Forbes magazine’s longest serving foreign correspondent, has won multiple Business Journalist Of The Year Awards, and is the author of two novels: The Hundred-Foot Journey and Buddhaland, Brooklyn. Robert Milburn is Penta’s reporter, both online and for the quarterly magazine. He reviews everything from family office regulations to obscure jazz recordings.